Curious Power Failure (need help troubleshooting)

Installation
1

Hello,

My setup:
-Raspberry Pi 4, ethernet connected
-HA boots from an external SSD

I had the following problem on my HA

  • I’m able to turn lights off/on in Lovelace
  • But unable to go into any settings menu (unfortunately I don’t recall what the exact error was, but no screen loaded)
  • So I power cycled my Pi4, as I could not go into the settings menu to reboot.
  • Then, I saw that both lights were on and static. Which indicated a boot issue. I couldn’t ping the HA instance.

After trying a bunch of things, I moved over the SSD to the black USB ports. This finally worked.

In conclusion,

  • the USB3 (blue) ports don’t seem to be able to boot up HA. Both of them.
  • And the other USB ports are fine and HA is running as usual.

How do I troubleshoot this?
/ Does this mean the USB3 ports are fried?
/ How do I verify this?
/ Would there be something useful in HA logs? How do I see this?

Thank you!

2

The pi 4 USB ports are low power output & generally have trouble supplying high power devices like hard drives and some solid state drives.
You can try to use a powered hub or perhaps enable max current for the USB ports on the pi
Also confirm that you got a good input power source.
Hope this helps
Best regards.
Davidsg33k

1 Like
3

Thanks @Davidsg33k

Power source is the official raspberry pi 4 USB-C charger. So I think that’s fine.

On the USB ports -:
a) It was working fine for months before this issue
b) HA is working fine on the non USB3 ports

Is there a way to figure out if the ports themselves are working?
And if there is a low power issue, how do I check that?

thanks!

4

Perhaps a USB current tester.

Definitely interested, I believe it’s possible that it corrupted some of the file system.

Do you have a spare SD or ssd to test a fresh install?
Here is some more info.
https://linuxhint.com/usb-ports-not-working-raspberry-pi/

Best regards
Davidsg33k